With the usage of liquid crystal, organic light emitting diode, plasma, and the like type display screens in consumer electronic devices such as personal media players, digital photo frames, computers, cell phones, digital projectors, and TVs the flat screen television industry, the computing industry and digital camera industries have grown to a tremendous size. With millions of displays manufactured, consumers have enjoyed a substantial drop in the cost of display devices. With inexpensive display devices, clusters of these displays can be created on a wall for a wide range of purposes including but not limited to displaying personal digital pictures and video clips. These clusters can be created to be in several kinds of patterns and of differing screen sizes. The goal of many is to tile these displays in a manner that allows a single image to be presented across the displays in a relatively continuous manner.
For example, it is known to link together displays for computer monitors with two and three displays linked together and connected to a single computer for use in providing increased workspace of computer aided design and spreadsheet type applications. It is also known to link together displays to provide gaming experiences such as immersive environments. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 7,091,926 what is suggested is to create a three dimensional immersive environment using a plurality of flat displays arranged in a concave like shape around a field of view of a user. However, here too, the general objective is to provide a display experience that is essentially the equivalent of single presented image, although provided in a manner that is intended to simulate the field of view of a person.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,570,546 describes separate displays that visually see adjacent displays via optical or electrical sensors. Yet there is no means for feed back provided to the user for each of the display locations or ability to move images from display to display.
Furthermore, multiple picture frames in various rooms of a house or multiple houses have been suggested in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,107,605 and 6,355,228, but there is no way to interact as a user from frame to frame or manage a wall of images from any of the single frames. Thus, what is needed is a system for managing the visual content in a cluster of digital media frames in a visual field by semantic type and in an interactive way.
In addition managing multimedia content across multiple displays and display types presents new problems to the user. Multiple digital displays can be arranged in an esthetically arranged grouping can present ever changing content which can be refreshed every few seconds. These groupings of digital photo frames can be placed within the same field of view or relative locations such as affixed to a wall or placed on a mantle provide a special case in that multiple frames may be presented in an array, matrix, of decorative pattern. This practice is analogous to how framed paper photographs are presented, often in grouping that have some thematic linkage such as, photos of grandchildren, a vacation, flowers, etc.
Unlike “fixed pattern” prior art systems, the devices of the invention can be of any number and can be located in any free form pattern or position desired by the user. Since digital picture frames can receive multimedia content wirelessly, the user can modify their positions and location at any time. It is desirable for esthetic, context, and story-telling applications to present the content in a sequence, form or format that takes advantage of the consumer selected pattern of digital picture frames.
Examples include; 3 digital photo frames are placed in close proximity to one another and arrayed in a single row, a panoramic digital image could be presented across the individual frames, without user intervention. Also since the relative locations, formats such as HDTV 16/9 or TV 4/3, and resolutions are known, the panoramic image can be split properly between the frames and can be loaded in such a way as to appear to sweep across all three frames. Another example; 9 digital photo frames are affixed to a wall in relative 3 by 3 matrix and the user designates to the system that the array is to be used to present pictures and videos of her “9 grandchildren” and each individual frame is designated for a particular grandchild. As the system receives semantically tagged content, such as an image with a metadata tag of the grandchild's name, the system would automatically place the appropriate grandchild tagged media on the appropriate digital photo frame of the array of grandchildren designated digital photo frames.
Furthermore digital “transitions” used in movies and digital slide shows are designed to be viewed on a single display and indicate transitions from one digital multimedia content element to the next. They can include an almost unlimited variety of digital effects that “temporally blend” the two sequential content elements so that the first content element disappears and the second content element appears. Any directional aspect of the transition is limited to the single frame or single presentation device in which the content is being viewed. With multiple presentations devices with known relative locations there is the opportunity to use transition effects to “spatially blend” content across multiple presentation devices. This provides a more esthetic viewing experience and would provide a user with an indication as to where to focus her attention when viewing multiple display devices.